Six years after Nintendo Co’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons became a lockdown phenomenon, the company is scoring another major hit worldwide from gamers seeking an escape from rising anxiety and isolation.
In Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, players oversee virtual islands where customised avatars interact with each other. Some simulate mundane life tasks, while others recreate famous faces and are shared for virality: One TikTok that has over 1.7 million views shows avatars resembling actors including Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge interacting with fictional characters like Charlie Brown and Cooking Mama, another Nintendo creation.
The life-simulation game is a surprise hit for Nintendo and racked up over 3.8 million units in global sales within two weeks of its release in April, outpacing Pokémon simulator Pokopia. That compares to sales for Super Mario Bros Wonder, which sold 4.3 million units within two weeks of its launch in 2023, making it the fastest-selling Super Mario title ever.
In June, Tomodachi Life topped sales charts for the third straight month in Japan, according to gaming magazine Famitsu. The game took the No 5 spot in the US in May after leading unit sales rankings the month before, market tracker Circana said.
Living the Dream is the latest instalment in the Tomodachi Life series, which was first released in 2009 and started the concept of allowing Nintendo players to import their Wii consoles’ Mii avatars onto a digital island. Producers who had worked on the original game wanted to make a more expansive sandbox of Mii characters that players could freely customise, yet still sit back and enjoy observing in a relaxed way, according to the company.
"Compared to other more competitive or lore-heavy games, life-sim games provide a way to immerse players into a more relaxing, slower and simpler world,” said Darang Candra, research director for Southeast Asia and East Asia at game research firm Niko Partners.
The game’s ability to bring people together showcases Nintendo’s skill in revamping simple styles of play into global entertainment properties, even as much of the industry focuses on competitive online play and more realistic graphics.
Tomodachi Life’s success may also relieve some pressure on the Kyoto, Japan-based company, whose shares have declined more than 30% so far this year due to soaring memory chip prices and a dearth of new titles from its most popular franchises.
The timing of Tomodachi Life’s success is no coincidence. Just as Animal Crossing came at a time of pandemic-induced loneliness and anxiety, its selling point as a relaxing game coincides with worsening global conflict, economic stress and social isolation. Its popularity also extends the recent boom for other life-simulator games such as Pokopia, French-Canadian game developer Alex Massé’s Paralives and Krafton Inc’s inZOI from South Korea.
People may play such games to imagine houses and lives beyond their current economic circumstances, said Maxwell Foxman, an associate professor of game studies at the University of Oregon who said Minecraft helped him realise his homeownership dreams during the 2008 recession. Habitual activities such as tending to farms or doing chores help players to relax, while games with multiplayer functions become a source of socialisation, he added.
"These games have become semi-public squares where people congregate,” said Foxman.
One major difference between Tomodachi Life and other life-simulator games is that it doesn’t require micromanaging characters, further lowering the level of commitment from players who may just want to tap in and out of their virtual worlds. Tomodachi Life players simply nudge their avatars into unpredictable interactions, "akin to watching an unscripted reality TV show,” said James McWhirter, senior analyst at technology research group Omdia.
"My Mii characters do their own thing, and there are certain choices they make that I can’t deny them,” said Wendy Rocket, based in Washington state, who spends their 50-minute walk to work in the morning catching up on friendships and conflicts that have formed between villagers. "That spice of not being able to control the whole island makes it a lot more interesting for me.”
What helps Tomodachi Life players construct such hyper-realistic worlds primed to go viral is a free fan-built tool called Living the Grid, which lets users build everything from miniature music albums and books to avatars of public figures. Its creator Clement Gonzalvez said estimated advertisement annual revenue from the tool has surpassed his previous salary at a corporate job in London. He recently left that job to focus more on freelance software projects including Living the Grid.
Global interest in life-simulator games is unlikely to go away as more people seek avenues to de-stress, and the number of such games continues to grow. But Tomodachi Life will likely sustain its momentum as it can tap a pool of 120 million estimated active users of both the Switch 1 and 2 consoles, said Niko Partners’ Candra. The consoles pair well with casual gaming, he added, and can "draw in a wider and highly engaged community of cosy-game players.” – Bloomberg
